Determinism - just another theory?

I was thinking on this topic recently, and here are my questions so far.

1) Do you believe that all events that happen in your life, are somehow determined by external causes? (whatever those might be)

2) If you believe that, what do you make of ''free will?" If everything is determined beforehand, do you think that people shouldn't be held morally responsible for their actions?

I'll give a partial answer to this, in my opinion, anyway. I think that there are things that happen in our lives, maybe bad childhoods or some other type of trauma, that can render us to act out in certain ways. That said, the circumstances that have been handed to us shouldn't dictate our lives. Determinism, in that sense, seems like a crutch. It could be however, that determinism is a real thing, and that free will is merely an illusion.

What are your thoughts to it?

 

I guess when I read this I was thinking of 'scientific determinism', not sure if that's what you're meaning though. Quantum Mechanics put an end to that. But about free will, I can't say really. I feel like as an adult I am largely responsible for my actions. Of course it could be that the laws of nature 'determine' I feel that way about myself. There is no consensus I'm aware of.

 

Love that you think on this sort of stuff D. I'm tired so I'll just quickly contribute. If a person determines their life to be determined then it is.

 

There are a lot of ''types'' of determinism, apparently. Feel free to discuss what you like on the topic. I'm speaking in a broader sense, when it comes to morality and responsibility. I agree with you on how you feel about it, pretty much. I'd say that life doesn't have much meaning if we have no choice in it. (I'm curious about your ideas on scientific determinism, too)

 

I don't see how everything can really determine me. Don't I determine it just as much just by existing? I mean, after all, I am a real thing. There is such a thing as me, and everything has to adjust to me, too. It's kind of weird to say that all of my actions are determined, 'cause they're MY actions. MINE.

MINE!

 

True! But, I'm wondering if determinism has more to do with like all of the things that have ''happened'' to us perhaps early on in life, that caused a chain of ''reactions'' (our actions) that wouldn't have any other outcome but the ones we chose, because of the things that have happened. To that I say, there are always options to do another thing, take a different action. It's like when you see two kids from the same parents, raised in the exact same way - one kid grows up and becomes a criminal, while the other, leads a somewhat successful life. But, those two kids might say that even though they grew up in the same home, with the same parents, they weren't treated the same, thus the outcomes of their lives turned out differently. Still, I think choices shape us more than anything, but determinism supports the idea that we act out the way we do, because we have no other choice due to the hands we were dealt. Idk how much of that I believe.

 

What if some quantum randomness were to occur in one neuron in the brain that causes a chain reaction leading to a particular action, an action that wouldn't have been taken otherwise? That would, I feel, argue against free will. But I wouldn't call that determinism either because of the randomness of the cause. Is there some third interpretation?

 

I think it largely depends on various factors. Circumstances can certainly dictate outcomes, to a larger extent in some circumstances than in others.

I typed more but erased it because I think I need to think on this more. This is good food for thought, Deidre.

 

Yeah, but even from the moment of your conception everything has to react to you as well, right? I know you're kind of helpless as an infant, but, like, say if your dad hates you, it's still because of you, for whatever reason. That is, he wouldn't hate you if you didn't exist. We may have no choice, ultimately, but I don't know if the subject is about choice so much as cause and effect. Your very existence determines something about the world, so I would say you determine things just as much as anything determines you. Like I say, even if it doesn't boil down to your choices but rather just the effect you have on the world.

I kind of do believe in determinism to some extent. It's not that, if you are abused, for instance, you'll become a criminal, but for those that do, they honestly couldn't handle the abuse in a positive way.

 

I ascribe to Determinism, I think one could make a reductionist argument that all events in one's life are determined by external causes, but in the sense that I gather from how you are asking it, the individual is comprised of deterministic causes as well, so there are certain parameters in which an individual can navigate particular external pressures. For instance you cannot jump in water or sit in the air but you can jump over a log or climb a tree.

I'm tending towards free will being an illusion but If we were to take determinism literally, morality would be rendered a meaningless concept making the question unintelligible. However we have lived far too instinctually for the past 100,000+ years to really entertain the idea of not holding people responsible for their actions.

 

No, I make my own luck and my own fate.
Sure, circumstances play an effect in what happens in your life but I believe you put yourself in those circumstance. It reminds me a little when my sister saw a psychic who told her she'd have dark haired, dark skin children. Filled with this belief she started actively trying to look for a partner with those same characteristics. Now, had she succeeded in finding that partner and given birth to those children, was the psychic right, or, did the psychic plant a vision that she herself sought after? Because to me, the psychic planted the suggestion which led to a pre determined and pre meditated outcome.

It didn't come true, she had blonde daughter.

But those are the circumstances that change life, but they were also pre determined (had they come true), so I can't say had it worked out like that, that it was woven fate because she went out to achieve that scenario.

 

I like that @guerillabedlam - morality would be a meaningless concept. And then more questions come from that - Who decides morality? Is there a universal idea of it?

I'm off to bed soon, my brain is done thinking for now.

 

Wow, what a story! In some ways, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I dated a guy who told me that his father kept telling him as a kid ''you'll always be a fuck up,'' and he sort of became this guy who always made excuses for why he couldn't finish this or that, or why he quit yet another job. I wouldn't call him a ''fuck up,'' but he took his dad's words to heart, and never tried to see himself as something other than how his dad saw him. So, he created a life based on something he really had no control over as a kid, his father's behavior. But the thing is, he had the ability to make better choices later on.

Regarding your sister, I think that she may have been searching for something and the psychic gave her that something, so your sister had a purpose in a way, to seek after a certain partner. What did your sister think after having a blond daughter? lol

 

Oh after a while she gave up on trying to find a man to father those kids lol. Now she's just with her husband. She blonde, he's blonde. Blonde daughter.

Its like how I think for me like, I want to achieve some sort of greatness in my pool playing. But I wasn't born with a fate to do that, it's all on me if I do make it, it'll be because I put myself in all those circumstances. It wasn't fate that I met my wife, my family moved country due to hard times. Those circumstances gave me the life I live now. So that would be bad fate for them and good fate for me, but to me it's just how things went.

Its also like this sermon I watched not too long ago, I have a habit of flicking to Christian channels on TV I find them very positive. Anyway this preacher was saying God only helps those that help themselves. So you can't sit there and do nothing and expect anything in return, you need to go out and achieve yourself. You make your own way in life. I know that's hard to say to people born in bad environments and really can't get anywhere in life, but then you read the stories of the ones that do and of their fate was to be nothing, then they changed that themselves.

I dunno, I might be rambling sorry.

 

Everybody's different. Just because one person can rise above their bad circumstances doesn't mean that it's even possible for 90% of the rest of the people who are.

 

Free will is the ability to choose outside of the chain of events you would be if you never exercised your free will. That's the first thing that came to mind but I'm going to think more about it.

I said last time I mentioned it that it wouldn't be the last time... but David Eagleman's "The Brain" series goes into the fact that more of the way we work is subconscious, than conscious. You're making decisions before you know you've made them, and sometimes coming up with the reason you made that decision after it's been made.

He argues that no-one is really "responsible" in the way we think we are.

 

I tend to think of all events that have happened throughout history as a series of dominoes falling into one another. Each event can only happen because of the events that immediately preceded it. They could not have happened another way, or they would have.

I have noticed that we really do not like the deterministic view of the world. So I and others go about our lives as if free will exists, because it does appear that way, doesn’t it?

I will think of more to say later—I love this topic, but I realllly have to get up and get to work. Boo.

 

I favor compatibilism or "soft determinism" proposed by Daniel Dennett.:
“The model of decision making I am proposing, has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision,
a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined produces a series of considerations, some of
which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations
that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process,
and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent’s final
decision.”

 

Sorry I didn't have time for a fuller exposition earlier. Let me try one now. The compatibilism ("soft determinism") of Dennett, as opposed to the "hard determinism" of his fellow atheist "horseman" Sam Harris, is the belief that free will, defined practically as being able to make meaningful choices and to do what we perceive we want to do, is compatible with ultimate determinism. Nearly three-fifths of top philosophy professors are compatibilists. Dennett vs. Harris on Free Will • Richard Carrier . Admittedly, we can't choose our desires. The "I" who Editmakes decisions is a product of nature and nurture, continually reshaped by changing external and internal influences. Yet this doesn't preclude meaningful choices among alternative courses of action in pursuit of our programmed goals by means of reason instead of reflex.( Michu Kaku, The Future of the Mind.) Harris is overly impressed by the fact that some of our behavior, like driving a car or typing, is governed by autonomic processes that bypass conscious reflection, and by experiments showing that we can make certain simple decisions before we are consciously aware of making them. But our brains seem to be modularized, and higher level decisions are referred to conscious decision centers of the brain for choices. Without such a model, the notion of personal responsibility is meaningless, unless we are to regard it as simply another stimulus affecting reflexes. Dennett believes that a largely indeterministic universe would be incompatible with free will because it would preclude rational choices. If a person is able to use reason to make choices, (s)he has free will in the only meaningful sense, regardless of whether or not the choices are made in pursuit of pre-programed goals. If the actor is cognitively impaired so that (s)he can't distinguish the nature and quality of his/her actions or appreciate the wrongfulness of the conduct, or if (s)he is suffering from an irresistible impulse or other mental disease or disorder that would impair judgment, then free will would be impaired and we could say he/she is not responsible for the conduct.

I just posted on this thread when I could have been doing something else. Why did I do that? Because I found the topic interesting, and could relate my knowledge to it. But why did I have that interest and acquire that knowledge, when other folks probably wouldn't give a rats ass about it. Hard to say. But I suspect something in my childhood experiences and personality made those things more salient to me than to other people. I'm more introspective than most, more religious, and like to read a lot. Whether that's a result of genetics, upbringing or early childhood experiences is hard for me to tell, but they weren't choices, in the sense that I sat down one day, thought it over, and decided to have those characteristics. The happenstance that I was on the forum, looked at the religion forum instead of the politics forum that I've been mainly interested in, etc, could, in my opinion, be just coincidence. I had to do a little wrestling with myself to formulate this post, as opposed to walking the dog or getting my Christmas cards off, so I'm satisfied that I made a choice freely to do this: nobody was forcing me to, and there seems to have been an element of chance involved. But I exercised the choices within the constraints of my personality, interests and values which I mostly didn't choose.

 

That was a really bizarre blog, there were a few parts I could probably touch upon but I want to focus on one part. I'll mention I read Free Will by Harris several years ago, so admittedly I might not recall explicitly what was mentioned in that book vs his overall ideas on the subject, but I don't believe anything in the below video is in contrast to that book. From the blog...

Harris breaks down Consciousness here, describing aspects which are generally considered: the Easy Problem of Consciousness vs. Hard Problem of Consciousness. The easy problems being those aspects of brain activity and/or various autonomic responses which can be objectively measured, scanned, graphed, etc. to correlate with reported mental states vs the Hard Problem being the subjective quality of personal experience.

He goes on to mention that the "self", as in the ego or sense of "I" (identity) is an illusion. What we experience as a thinker of thoughts ("Sense we have of riding around in our heads as a passenger of the body") is a changing system. Harris suggests that there are even certain experiences of consciousness where the sense of self can drop out completely, which he refers to as "self-transcendence" but also may be known as "ego death". If the self is illusory, then it follows there is no self to possess free will.

This is a key distinction between his approach to "consciousness" vs his approach to "free will". Consciousness can be viewed as subjective perceptions of identity whereas free will suggests authentic volition of identity, but identity is illusory, which is how he maintains that one of the concepts is useful while the other is not.